


Interview 01: False Start

by Defiler_Wyrm



Series: Interview with the Supersoldier [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Anal Sex, Bottom Bucky Barnes, Coming Out, Explicit Language, Gay Bucky Barnes, Interviews, Journalism, M/M, Mentions of Racism, Mentions of homophobia, POV First Person, POV Outsider, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:21:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24566062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defiler_Wyrm/pseuds/Defiler_Wyrm
Summary: Bucky instantly decides he doesn't like the journalist that shows up at his doorstep, and decides to fuck with him.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Interview with the Supersoldier [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1775686
Comments: 24
Kudos: 172
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	Interview 01: False Start

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: No Value
> 
> Major thanks to my beta readers, @Cloudycelebrations and @Rainne!

The traffic in Brooklyn is bad enough to put anyone in a foul mood. I’m still on edge by the time I make it to a nondescript brownstone in Park Slope. The man I’m here to meet surely hasn’t been out in traffic—my research, later confirmed, indicates that he doesn’t currently hold a driver’s license—so I can’t quite account for the simmering expression on his face from the moment we meet.

I can’t adequately describe what it feels like to stand in the presence of an actual historical figure and instantly be, for reasons unknown, found wanting. I feel what must be my very soul withering as James Buchanan Barnes greets me with his stormy blue eyes narrowed and his expressive mouth set hard. He does not like me from the start.

And that sucks, because I’m here to interview him.

Maybe, I think to myself as we enter a warm, homey living room bursting with houseplants, it’s because I addressed him as “Sergeant Barnes.” Like his equally-legendary friend, Steve Rogers (yes, _that_ Steve Rogers), with whom he co-owns the brownstone, he turned down the retroactive promotions that would have elevated him to the illustrious rank of Sergeant Major. I had planned to ask him about it but now I have my doubts. Mr. Barnes it is then.

He cuts an imposing figure. His hair spills in untamed waves across his shoulders. If the loose, soft-looking pants he’s wearing do little to hide how heavily muscled his legs are, the dubiously-sized V-neck perilously stretched across his upper body leaves almost nothing to the imagination: this is a lion of a man, with a catlike slink in his step to match his rippling muscles. It’s hard not to stare at his even more obvious feature: the gleaming, segmented metal prosthetic that has replaced his left arm and shoulder.

By now we all know the nauseating story behind how he got it: in 1944 he was captured by and experimented on by maniacal Nazi scientist Dr. Arnim Zola, the results of which allowed him to survive his historic fall from a train the following year, and after this he was assumed dead for decades. But in the shadows, the Nazi secret society Hydra recaptured him and spirited him away for more horrors in Russia. In Zola’s custody again, that arm—lost in the fall—was replaced with the one I’m desperately trying not to stare at now, and his identity and very humanity were stripped away to remake him as the nigh-mythical Winter Soldier.

I suppose if all that had happened to me, and then upon miraculously breaking through the brainwashing I had been almost immediately charged and tried for a litany of heinous crimes I couldn’t deny committing but did not perform by my own will, I would be pretty grumpy too.

Barnes doesn’t ask me how the ride in was. In fact for a long, awkward moment he doesn’t say anything at all. Then it’s as if he’s remembered his manners and asks if I want coffee. I take him up on his offer. He grunts and walks away.

Uncertain, I hang back at first, but then he pauses and inclines his head as if cocking an ear to listen for whether or not I’m following, so I hustle to catch up.

The kitchen is a lot more high tech than I would have expected, I tell him. It’s brimming with the latest gadgets, including a high-end espresso machine and smart fridge, all done up in black, white, and chrome. Barnes squints at me again before starting on a well-practiced coffee routine. He does it “the right way,” grinding whole beans, French press, and all.

“What’s the point of living in the future if you don’t make the most of it, right?” I nod and watch his hands. There’s a contradictory sort of reverence in the roteness of their motions. I recall that in the Army during World War II, and surely before that, all he would have had in the way of coffee was instant. This is a man counting his blessings.

“I dunno,” he goes on, “just seems pretty keen that so many things that were science fiction when I was...before everything, you can get at the grocer’s now.”

I try to ply him with humor. “Still no flying cars, though, sorry about that.”

Barnes doesn’t laugh. My stomach sinks a little further towards my shoes. “Would you really trust anyone in this city to drive in _three_ dimensions? Two’s bad enough. Probably for the best Ho—”

He stops there and pain flashes across his face, only for a moment. He’s about to refer to Howard Stark, of course: close ally in the war, dead by his own hand years later at Hydra’s command.

He restarts: “...That it never got off the ground.”

I choke back a laugh at the pun [?], and search his face to see if there’s humor in his eyes. There isn’t, not that I can see. Maybe joking around is just a reflex as he regains the man he used to be. Maybe it’s an affectation as he _tries_ to be that man. I’m not about to ask which.

He asks me how I take my coffee and he dutifully gives mine one spoon of sugar. Being a war-hardened veteran who came of age during the Great Depression, I would have expected Barnes to take his coffee pitch black. I’m very wrong. He fixes his draftsman style, with heavy whipping cream, an alarming amount of raw sugar, and a dash of raspberry syrup. He must notice my surprise because his shoulders rise and he looks grumpier than ever. I shrug as if to say, “No man, it’s cool, you’re allowed to take your coffee however you want.”

“We get it from a place on Bergen. Amazing what they can do with coffee these days so it doesn’t taste like sludge poured out of a tin can.” He’s still on the defensive, so I sip my coffee and agree, honestly, that it’s a good cup of joe.

Barnes shakes his head and then smooths his hair back behind an ear. “Honestly I don’t know why everyone seems to expect me to pine for the old days. The old days kinda fuckin’ sucked.”

This time I can’t restrain a surprised laugh. He gestures with his mug. “It’s true! Steve an’ me lived in a two-room coldwater apartment. Our kitchen table was a board we put over the bathtub and there was one toilet on our floor for everyone out in the fuckin’ hall. We worked our asses off for scraps and then went off to die for America in the war. We couldn’t even—”

He cuts himself off again. This time it’s with a suspicious, almost paranoid stare in my direction. I don’t press.

A lot of things are definitely better now, I agree with him. He raises his cup to me for that and my stomach moves a few inches back towards where it should be. “Yeah. Vaccines, sanitation, politics for the most part, the internet, cars are safer, people are safer for the most part. The fellas in the bars around here ain't getting locked up for dancing with each other. Whites and co—no, sorry, it’s changed, Black people can marry. Hell, they can vote. You know I found out Gabe fuckin’ Jones couldn’t vote till the Sixties? Gabe, the Howling Commando, one of Captain _fucking_ America’s men, war hero? _Fuck_ the old days, I’ll take the weird slang and long list of words we can’t say anymore over that shit any day,” he concludes, with great feeling.

I don’t know what to say. He’s right on all counts. We drink our coffee in silence for a moment before he leads me back to the living room. The couches are plush—and a bit scratched up on one end, I note.

“Yeah, Alpine’s going through a phase,” Barnes explains, “we’re working on it. My cat. Found him in a box on the side of the road on one of our walks. I didn’t get a word in edgewise before Steve said yes to keeping him.” Now, finally, there’s a fleeting smile on his face as he looks at his own bare feet. Having seen a world-famous Bucky Barnes smile in person, even if it’s the ghost of one, I can see why he was known in his day as the kind of person who lights up a room and charms upstanding young women out of their skirts. If he ever smiles fully, it might blind me.

He clears his throat. “So, let’s do this.”

I came prepared with a few questions I want to ask. It took me five days to pare down the list to something manageable. How do you choose your interview questions for a legend? What do you ask of a myth? Right now I want to ask him what his favorite part of living in 2015 is, but he heads me off at the pass with a different tack.

“Bet you’re after war stories. Everyone is. Well, I got one for ya.” I try not to look as excited as I am by that prospect because yes, in fact, I _do_ want war stories. It’s one thing to learn about the Howling Commandos all through school and then read twenty different World War II books about them in preparation for one interview; it’s entirely another to hear them directly from the horse’s mouth. Or lion’s, as the case may be.

I suppose that means I’m currently in the lion’s den. My palms are a little sweaty as I put the tape recorder on the table between us—yes, the old school type with a microcassette; call it nostalgia. Having seen his kitchen, it feels a little silly now.

He savors his coffee and, I imagine, my anticipation. “So if you know anything about being on the front, you know it’s tense as piano wire out there. The jerries could come outta nowhere at any moment, that nice French family that takes you in could turn out to be Vichy, bombs could drop, could find a mine with your foot, every kind of danger you could imagine and then some. You sleep with one eye open for three hours a night if you can manage that much, and if you’re lucky, you don’t wake up dead.

“Stands to reason you don’t ever make the mistake of thinking you’re really, truly safe anywhere. But it also means if you ever get a chance to have some fun, you fuckin’ take it, ‘cause you don’t know when the next chance is gonna come, if ever.”

I’m with him so far.

“So if you’re all put up for the night at a local’s farmhouse and there’s a barn and everyone else is asleep….” He spreads his hands. “Prime time to go play hide the sausage. So there I was, bent over a sawhorse with my pants around my knees and my fella balls deep in me—”

I choke on my coffee. Barnes is merciless. He doesn’t bat an eye, much less pause.

“And just as I’m about to get where I’m goin’, I hear this ‘ _Links, geh herum,’_ real quiet, barely caught it over my guy’s huffin’ and puffin’. I ain’t even got enough time to warn ’im, I just reach down and grab my gun and all of a sudden, there’s _fuckin’ Nazis_ swarming the barn and there’s us _literally_ caught with our pants down, dicks out on full display. They’re shooting, we’re shooting, we’re better fuckin’ shots, the kr—fuck, sorry, the Germans go down, we’re scrambling to get our pants back up before the rest of the gang turns up. Just fucking barely, let me tell you. I had to pass off finishing my belt as fumbling to put my goddamn gun back in its holster in the dark. Come to find out that nice French family that put us up? More like _set_ us up—sure enough, the bastards were Vichy after all.

“Of course, after we arrested them, me and my fella took the next watch so we could finish what we started. Moral of the story? Fuck with your clothes on.” He slurps the last of his coffee, looking smug. “How’s _that_ for a war story?”

I tell him I need a moment to process this.

In the 1930s, he lived in Brooklyn Heights. Now he lives in Park Slope. The former was then what the latter is now: a heavily LGBT neighborhood.

Bucky Barnes is gay. Or maybe bi. 

Bucky Barnes had a sexual affair with one of the Howling Commandos.

Bucky Barnes just made it explicitly clear that _he bottoms_.

I don’t know how to handle this information. But I know one thing for certain: my editor would skin me and throw the rest out on the street if I bring her this story as-is. It's obscene, the kind of stuff even tabloids wouldn't run with direct quotes. If I can flesh this out, get something usable, it'll be the biggest coming-out story in US history and I'll be the one to break it. If I don't, someone else will.

I glance at my watch and immediately curse. My window of time to be here is limited. To wit, it's just about up.

Barnes is staring at me, defiant. He glances at my watch too. "About that time, huh."

I stumble over using Sergeant vs. Mr. in starting my entreaty.

"Bucky."

Bucky, I correct myself. I tell him I can't run this.

"Sorry to waste your time." He shrugs one shoulder and doesn't look apologetic at all.

But, I tell him, there's something more important underneath it. Like it or not, and I can't imagine he likes being reminded of this all things considered, but he's a legendary historical figure who means a great deal to millions, and the revelation that he's gay—or bi, whichever—is monumental. It deserves to be more than just a heavily censored blurb. If he'll let me come back, make a real story of this, I'll do it justice.

Barnes chews his lip. His eyes look nearly grey in this light when they're downcast. I really wish I had time to sit here and mull it over.

Finally, I nod, resigned to my fate. I can feel Barnes' considering eyes on me again as I pick up the recorder and erase the tape. I thank him for his time, and stand to leave. My pre-scheduled Uber will be here soon.

As we say our goodbyes, he pauses and says my name to get my attention.

"Same time tomorrow. I'll make coffee."

My stomach finally rights itself. As leaden as I've felt since that door opened, I'm feather-light now. This is going to make history. _I'm_ going to make history. There's a lesson here I'll remember for the rest of my days: just because you can't use something doesn't mean it has no value.

**Author's Note:**

> Heavily inspired by recent terrible interviews with Sebastian Stan and Chris Evans.


End file.
